I hope this brings some measure of peace and closure for his family and friends.
I had to read scores of tech bros in the professional-managerial class whinge about the poor, about black lives matter and how this was due to "progressivism".
Turns out the suspected murderer is a guy who describes himself as an "entrepreneur" on Linkedin and has a Crunchbase listing where he is described as being in executive management. Maybe we should have law enforcement target entrepreneurs as opposed to people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity on display in San Francisco.
I remember reading blog after blog on HN about people moving out of SF specifically for what the city had become.
Always important to reflect on whether stances like "SF is degenerating" are based on a rational analysis of what is actually happening, versus a more emotional response to stories that might be more like the topic of this post, just with less visibility into the exact circumstances of what happened.
Not saying that's likely happening here, but the clear response to the original news was that this was the perfect example of what SF is becoming. How often does that assumption happen?
But all the comments, tweets, etc immediately came out blaming SF government and SF's general crime problem specifically for Bob Lee's death. Like they couldn't just wait a teeny bit before forming an opinion after more facts were known? Especially from the crowd that prides itself on "logic" and "data driven" decisions.
You point out the falsity and people call you naive and say it's the crime stats that are wrong, not their take. Their version is reality.
As a San Francisco resident, I don't want us wasting time, energy and resources going after the wrong problems.
https://sfstandard.com/perspectives/perspective-why-your-cha...
It seems equally weird to me that so many people are taking this anecdote as a sort of proof that San Francisco does not have a crime problem.
Focusing on individual anecdotes and swinging from one conclusion to another is the real problem. The source of this unfortunate murder shouldn’t dictate your entire view of a city’s crime problem.
Same here - techies shocked, _shocked_ that one of "their own" could commit a crime like this. Easier for them to talk about crime in general than lay blame at the feet on one of "their own".
In 2011, in incidents of murder for which the relationships of murder victims and offenders were known, 54.3 percent were killed by someone they knew (acquaintance, neighbor, friend, boyfriend, etc.); 24.8 percent of victims were slain by family members. The relationship of murder victims and offenders was unknown in 44.1 percent of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter incidents in 2011.
In short, people were killed by strangers 11.7% of the time. For 88.3% of murders (where the relationship between the killer and the victim was known), it was someone the victim knew.
The statistics are similar for sexual violence.
For juveniles and children who experience sexual violence, it is a family member of acquaintance 93% of the time. This percentage drops for adults to ~80%, i.e. in 80% of cases the victim will know the perpetrator.
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violenc...
These crimes are very different from a mugging or robbery. It is easy to imagine why if you replay the situation in your mind — looking someone in the eyes as you stab them, up close takes a lot emotionally. It is a very intense situation. Almost everyone — if driven to it — will steal out of desperation and hunger, but very few can look people in the eye, walk up to them and stick a knife in them. There is a strong psychological aversion to hurting other human beings built into most of us and it's what keeps society mostly safe.
Had there not been the entrenched environment of lawlessness in SF the perpetrator would not have even attempted his attack. And had the victim not been a prominent person the SF police would not have bothered to keep looking.
The only mistake the murderer made here is he underestimated the public outcry that forced the police and the DA to keep investigating in fear of theirs and the city's reputation.
Maybe it's time to wake up.
One can only imagine what these two "tech industry" people were arguing about before one killed the other. The media reports make them sound like such wonderfully nice people, drinking and driving around SF at 2am on a Tuesday, one of them liking stay out to the wee hours on weeknights the other liking to keep butterfly and switch blades in his car. One of them apparently believed an "emotional narrative" about SF being in decline; that's allegedly why he moved to Miami.
Here is the Expand IT Inc. website, listing the survivor's colleagues.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230413142515if_/https://www.ex...
All these references to "Cash App" in the articles about this crime yet none explaining its main use has been amongst criminals.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
- narrative A (looking "up"): where the upper-class technologists are the reason for the social precarity-based hellscape experienced by the lower-class residents
- narrative B (looking "down"): where the crime of the lower-class is the cause of the fearful crime-based hellscape experienced by the upper-class technologists
The reality is probably a little bit of both. But in typing this, I'm realizing that I should probably try to avoid sensationalizing the topic with references to "hell" (though I realize you were using that phrase to dismantle the sensationalism, not escalate it)
So, the ratio is somewhere between 10% stranger to 90% family and acquaintance and 60% stranger to 40% family and acquaintance.
- 1,622 homicides
- 1,246 where (known vs. stranger) relationships were established
- 354 of that 1,246 attributed to strangers
Today's clearance rate is lower [1], but it's not really apples-to-apples comparison for a lot of reasons relating to recordkeeping conventions. But clearance rate for white homicide victims in NYC is still around ~85%. The past few years, the % of overall victims that were killed by strangers is around 5% [2].
So yes, there is still some uncertainty in the exact ratio of stranger/friend/unknown suspects. But still not rational to automatically assume that Lee was the victim of random crime.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/20/archives/murders-by-stran...
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/crime-without-punishmen...
[2] https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-stranger-o...
IIRC it was at least partly getting lead out of gasoline in the '70s: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/06/01/new-evide...
Mission Local seems to serve their local bureaucratic masters over the basic public safety needs of the people. [0]
This is gaslighting. You should be ashamed. [1]
In this case they are “independent” of a sort [2]
In all fairness, he did retweet this article a couple hours ago.
[0] https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1644520924828540929?s=20
[1] https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1644510807060021249?s=20
[2] https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1644535178856124418?s=20
Lots of little papers like this seem healthy and then unceremoniously go out of business because they don't make enough money in ad revenue to pay their journalists like 45k/yr. That's not a typo: that's how much Bay Area reporters make.
Support local journalism!
Beyond that, it's nor clear to me that revealing the actual name or other personal details of the suspect serves a legitimate purpose of advancing justice or society; however, it is not out of keeping with journalistic practice in other criminal cases in California. Suspects' names get printed in newspapers for far lower profile crimes all the time.
The police arresting people in secret has historically been .. problematic at best.
But do I feel less safe? Absolutely not! The neighborhoods (where most people live) are just fine. I regularly walk home from the bars at midnight without a care. It's simply not a problem.
Compare back to the mid-90's, when there was active gun/gang violence in the Mission corridor ... quite frankly, I feel far safer today than I used to.
I don't understand why it has to be "SF is perfectly safe" or "SF is a dystopian hellhole". Why not pick a middle ground?
Also, why do we never factor gun violence into these conversations about safety? In SF there are relatively few people walking around strapped. I looked it up, and in my hometown of Louisville, KY (which is no Detroit or Baltimore), there were about 130 gun injuries/deaths per 100k in a recent year -- in SF, about 30! Which is worse, getting shot, or avoiding poop on the sidewalk?
But also, for what it's worth, I'm a reasonably tall white guy. I think that affects how many unsafe situations I'm likely to encounter A LOT.
Therefore the need to rely on data to find more objectivity when debating public policies. Yes data can be twisted and most of the time is poorly reported and interpreted by people, but it's better than relying on personal anecdotes.
I'm sure parents with young children or elderly have a different experience but that's not different for any other larger US city.
With this said, the topic of the city turning a blind eye to property crime and "extreme", visible destitution is a whole different story.
Also, we should differentiate between the feeling of comfort / safety (which is what most people care about), and actual crime statistics (which are themselves fraught, I don't think people in SF even report car break-ins these days since the police and justice systems don't work any more).
> Brousseau was walking home from Dolores Park at 8:22 p.m. Friday when 50 to 60 shots were fired at the intersection of Rosa Parks Lane and Guerrero Street, according to San Francisco police. The gunfire left him critically wounded and caused non-life-threatening injuries to an 18-year-old victim https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Twitter-employee-t...
And if you'd rather have the tl;dr version: https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/22-Year-Old-Suff...
Rosa Parks Lane & Guerrero Street is one block away from Valencia Street.
I used to live in the area around the same time. I walked Guerrero frequently to go grocery shopping and get to my gym, usually between 7:00pm and 10:00pm. That easily could have been me. Needless to say I don't live there anymore.
Black Cat, Emperor Norton's, Zombie Village, Bar 888, Tempest, the EndUp...Maybe one reason the "SF is a hellhole" crowd are so negative about this town are because they shut themselves out of so many great places!
I'm very comfortable with cities, but as a visitor to SF seeing someone break into a vehicle on a busy street, 8 pm on a Saturday night is pretty bad.
That sort of crime matters too.
This is simply a narrative that certain people are trying to portray to prove that certain policy doesn’t work. It’s nonsense.
Completely agree, I was downvoted into oblivion last week for claiming it was possibly somebody in his circle rather than a random stanger. The assumptions made about the inhumanity of the homeless/poor is worrying.
It actually says a lot about SF that people would jump to that conclusion. SF is not in a good place. It has deteriorated over the past 2 decades. But it's not why Bob Lee is dead.
His first and only response was "well, how do you know that's even related? Most people get killed by somebody they know." and I was like "well, yeah, but San Francisco is bad right now" and the conversation moved on.
Edit: Added "violent," to preempt diversions about non-violent crimes.
This suspect is innocent until proven guilty and we will all still be here when the trial finishes. There is no reason to rush out to come up with a viewpoint that might be shown false with later revelations. If we've learned something from the people who jumped straight to total confidence that it was caused by homelessness, then let's apply it.
Not saying that's related, but you would have to investigate that angle in a murder.
It's way more common to ignore/forget/never mention again anything bad someone who died did.
Also the crypto world seems to be getting a bit stabby in various ways, as things come crashing down there may be repercussions. Unlikely in this case, probably. Much more likely to be domestic of some sort.
Source?
But when I suggested it in an earlier thread I was criticized and downvoted for “spreading conspiracy theories.”
I know we shouldn’t speculate but everyone else was speculating that it was random!
There's comments is this thread of amazing journalism but the LLC shows as inactive on the Division of CA website (entity 201008110204) and the Expand IT website itself is dead. For all we know, this is a Lyft or Uber driver. Unless I'm missing some SFPD statement known to the journalist?
EDIT: got an old filling; see njstraub608's comment. My mistake
Could it be an uber driver or lyft driver? Sure. But it seems like someone who has run a consulting business for many years in the tech space.
First, you apparently missed this paragraph:
Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.
Doesn't sound to me like the reporter is just speculating based on the LinkedIn profile.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure you have the wrong filing. The LinkedIn profile says "Inc", not "LLC", so I think it's probably file #4776106, which is still active, and registered with an address in Emeryville, which is where police were headed to arrest Momeni.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/04/bob-lee-killing-arrest-made...
The murder rate in San Francisco is preposterously low.
Chicago deals with the same.
I feel pretty confident that some of this is astroturfing from people with political ideologies trying to score points on blue states, but it seems to be quite effective however it is accomplished. People can be quick to scare, and appeals to their sense of personal safety are quite powerful.
The article has a link to a LinkedIn profile. The writer indicates that the name and city of the LI profile matches the information on the person they were "told" was arrested this morning. Even the name of the company of the person indicated is explicitly referenced in the article.
My professional world doesn't allow for ambiguity. As a journalist, how sure do you need to be about the accuracy of this information before going public?
[1] https://somafm.com/scanner/ [2] https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/Police-Department-Incid... [3] https://www.sfsheriff.com/find-person-jail
What I find interesting is indicating a LinkedIn profile, unless of course this reporter has access to investigation documents that also identify the LinkedIn profile.
It could very well be a different person with the same name in the same town. Why take the risk? Just so you can have the juicy headline "alleged killer also worked in tech."
you're living in the past, my friend. no such professional standard exists today.
https://www.twitter.com/crazybob/status/1181668744247930880/...
But if you decide to dismiss the concerns about the excesses of the far left by pointing to racist responses to a tweet somewhere, you aren't being honest about a real problem.
I avoid the term "woke", but when James Carville (famous democratic strategist) said "wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it" (in regards to the far left harming mainstream democrats in elections), I'm not sitting around scratching my head bewildered as to what he's talking about.
Anyways, really sad story, that touched a lot of us close to home. (We still don't know what happened, these are still allegations.)
P.S. The other sad part for me was that passersby sped away instead of helping immediately. Moments count in these cases.
I had family ask me about it, concerned for my welfare, and I told them I was confused why this was getting national media coverage other violent crimes in SF hadn't received, and mentioned my initial thoughts that it might have been motivate by sketchy cryptocurrency crap.
Yet when I saw the popular narrative that it was some random stabbing in SF I didn't really have a reason to doubt it: I've personally been chased by a crazy person with a knife in the city.
Glad they got their man!
The linked article contains the full name, age, and city of residency.
Name, age, city is pretty common; especially name and age of someone arrested. I'd imagine it public records.
Some quick googling for recent examples. I just looked for news articles, not sure what if the police release has more residency info on the ones that aren't listed in the articles.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-17/suspect-... - name and age
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/2-chicago-men-charged-in-d... - names, ages, city
https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-music-shootings-arr... - name and age
And no, BuzzFeed News is as trash as BuzzFeed.
Bob Lee's murder wasn't a random crime. Crime is out of control in SF
Even in SF, murders by strangers are really, really rare.
As Bob Lee was bleeding out, he went to driver for aid who ignored him and fled the scene. Shouldn't they be arrested and charged for failure to render aid? Perhaps he would've had a chance if he had arrived at a trauma ER but it's now an unknowable.
It'll be interesting when more details come out.
All the "SF is going downhill!" stuff that came out... seems pretty irrelevant given this wasn't a random act of violence.
Part of me felt this was personal. A stabbing you have to get fairly close. Bob Lee could know his killer. And I don’t know him well enough to know who he hung out with.
Terrible prediction. This is why I never gamble.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/bob-lee-cash-app-killi...
https://www.ktvu.com/news/what-we-know-about-nima-momeni-sus...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/04/13/bob-lee...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/bob-lee-san-francisco...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bob-lee-murder-san-francisco-p...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/04/13/who-is-...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/nima-momeni-san-fr...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/nima...
https://abc7news.com/bob-lee-arrest-nima-momeni-cash-app-fou...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/arrest-in-bob-le...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11969477/San-Franci...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/13/bob-lee-kill...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/13/bob-lee-m...
https://nytimas.com/nima-momeni-5-quick-facts-you-need-to-kn...
https://fortune.com/2023/04/13/san-francisco-police-reported...
More on Block/Cash App:
https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/
More on MobileCoin:
https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messa...
We find the crime narrative so appealing though. It’s those dirty homeless. That’s why crime has gone up (homicides in SF at historic lows). And it’s exceedingly hard to overcome emotionally. I get it. But HN is supposed to be a logical community, not one where emotions are allowed to run rampant.
When I walked up to my car with broken windows, my initial reaction was to blame the homeless guy next to our on the street. But realistically, who would stay by the site of a crime? Maybe that’s what he wanted me to think, but seems unlikely and he was very afraid I’d tear into him about it because that’s probably happened to him more than once in the past. They know how other people look at them and that takes a serious mental toll on you. How could it not if the vast majority of people around you treat you like shit. I had to remember that the factual reporting on the topic seems to point that SF’s car breakins problem is an organized crime. A crime ring the SF police can’t or won’t get a handle on. Maybe an explicit deal to keep homicide rates low? It came out Toronto police had been doing that and following that violent crimes started going up quite rapidly. Drug dealers and organized crime organizations aren’t sleeping on the streets. Heck, I’m pretty sure one tried to approach me to be a mule and he was dressed upscale and definitely not homeless. Most violence is reliably either someone you know or more organized crime (eg gang initiations).
Sure. SF does have a really bad homeless problem. And they do cause problems but it’s mostly around there being messes everywhere which is unpleasant and is uncomfortable being around unpredictable people with mental illnesses. But I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes mostly because of how society treats them, so I at least try to have some compassion and engage with them from time to time. I know how to distinguish discomfort from feeling unsafe. I know logically and factually even crazy people walking around on the street are not going to turn into a problem (I’m surrounded by them daily in the part of the city I live). But it’s still uncomfortable to be around and even my dog is wary of people like that which speaks to the base lizard brain reacting. I accept that’s my reaction but it fundamentally is not the other person’s problem. I’m responsible for my reaction to uncomfortable feelings.
That’s why I made the comment I did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899&p=8#35454676. I’m not surprised I was right. I’m sad at how strong and prevalent the “it’s gotta be the homeless” crowd was, facts be dammed.
People really need to understand homelessness and react to it with compassion rather than treating it like a dirty thing they might infect you with if they come near and the source of societies problems. Homelessness is ultimately a reflection of the failing of our society, not a reflection of the failings of the individuals impacted by it.
PS: the homeless don’t get any protection on the streets from the police. Most homeless crime is homeless on homeless because the police refuse to keep them safe or because the homeless district the police / governments due to repeated cycles of abuse and victimization. Not sure what the story is in SF per se, but I can’t imagine that part is better.
Worth keeping in mind next time something comes along that might confirm your priors.
(Edit: notable that the thread linked above had _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]. I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"? )
I try to keep that tidbit in mind.
I lived in SF for ~15 years, experienced multiple car breakins (when I had a car) and one weird guy who walked up to me on the street and said "I have a gun and I'm going to shoot you" (which I somehow calmly ignored). For the record, I didn't comment in that thread and I generally don't feel the need to bash SF in public - I just simply moved out.
I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.
Steven Pinker has made a career out of this. Ironically a lot of his adherents are quick to jump on the "this is the safest time in human history" statistical warbling when discussing an issue they feel doesn't personally affect them.
"You can be mad but I guess I don’t personally view my car as an extension of myself and I’ve never really felt violated any of the 15 or so times my car was broken in to. Once a guy accidentally left a cool knife in my car so if it keeps happening you might get a little treat." --Seth Rogen
You are making the poster's exact point for them. Take a step back, breathe, think.
It's just wrong. You're wrong. Any narrative to the effect of "SF is unsafe because of ..." is wrong, because SF is not unsafe in any measurable way.
And more to the point: those very (wrong) narratives are simply out of control among the prevailing demographic here on HN. And frankly it's getting kinda toxic.
Thank you!
Austin has 2.57 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100K. Same year, SF has 6.35 per 100K. So SF is twice as bad as Austin. Your right about Miami though.
But 6.35 isn't bad. The murder rate in St Louis (for comparision to the US city with the worst) is 66.07 per 100K. And Colima Mexico (worst in the world maybe) is 182 murders per 100K.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
I know they’re in the linked table, just wanted to mention that even the best city in the US is still relatively bad.
That said moving to the west coast people freak out all the time about yearly murder rates that are a weekend in STL.
I once saw a crime map of the boroughs in a city where I lived. It showed the downtown as way higher than others per-capita, but it's because few live there as it's mostly commercial, more than higher absolute numbers. Lots of effects like this skew the numbers.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/murder-homi...
According to this[1], Sweden had 116 murders in 2022, less than the peak in 2020, which was 124. Basic maths tells me that' around 1.104 murders per 100K people (current population is 10.5 million).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533917/sweden-number-of-...
Puts thing into perspective.
https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-crime-rate-bob-lee-sf-vio...
2021 numbers put Austin slightly ahead of SF.
On this list of homicides per capita [1], San Francisco ranks far higher than Austin in incidents per capita of "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter": 2.57 per 100,000 people in Austin, vs. 6.35 per 100,000 in SF.
It also ranks higher than New York, Portland, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
SF is different. Within my first year there i had already seen someone shot in front my building (i didn’t witness it but the aftermath). An asian friend was slapped and her phone taken - she’d have given the phone anyway so the slap felt unnecessary. You fear parking your car - not trembling in your pants fear but a dread that you’ll have to deal with that shit again (now the breakins happen while you’re still in the car). You don’t know when someone is yelling on the street whether they are harmless or gonna attack you - doesn’t have to be a weapon just yelling at your face with saliva splattering all over you would traumatise you enough - yup, that happened too. My girlfriend and I used to try to help them. We’d give them leftover food - bakery items mostly. We’d see that all tossed on sidewalk when we walk that way again. There was always glass on the sidewalk. There’d be random tents you’ll have to get around. This is daily and adds up.
Like I said, I grew up in a violent town. So avoiding travel at night or going around the house locking windows or being aware of the approaching blind dark spot is something I’m used to. Most everyone around me was not. Even those from the Bay Area haven’t seen. I used to think they were weak but the truth is no one has to put up with it and I think people have the right to “feel” safe as well.
(Again, none if this will show up in a statistic and I’m not saying these people should be locked up in the name of tough on crime either. These are absolutely property crimes and quality of life crimes but you do feel fear and dread almost everyday)
Portland might not have a lot of gang violence (which is what really gets numbers up), but not violent isn't how I would describe the city.
Did you look at your own source? SF is 37 out of 100 for violent crime. That's comfortably above average, not "average or less"
There was a comment that was on that initial thread where the commenter said that they heard from "very well placed sources in the US Intelligence community this is probably a hit", and the commenter still went on to blame San Francisco for being a "crime ridden shithole". I responded with this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456746 , it was just bizarre to me.
Is it time now to maybe take a deep breath and think about maybe calling a truce? The hippies can be rough to live with but really they aren't so bad. I know a bunch.
What political beliefs are you referring to? The one about SF's crime wave sounds precisely on topic, for example.
Edit: those downvotes were very quick.
Agree that it's gross but we do it all the time, and I think too often it only feels horrible to people when the political beliefs aren't align with one's own. If the loudest voices in this incident had been pushing for increased funding for supportive housing or mental health services, would Joe Eskenazi have written an article titled "Bob Lee deserved better than to be killed — and then co-opted in death"? I kind of doubt it...
I think a part of it is people are fed up with how the city has deteriorated and no amount of gaslighting will change that fact. So, when he was killed it seemed like just another thing in the decline of the city.
Post any story - tech, biotech, engineering, finance, war - and half the comments are people confident they know “the real story” and how everyone is wrong.
Why would this story be any different?
I hope this news brings his family and friends some closure.
> San Francisco’s other homicide victims in 2023 are Gavin Boston, 40; Irving Sanchez-Morales, 28; Carlos Romero Flores, 29; Maxwell Maltzman, 18; Demario Lockett, 44; Maxwell Mason, 29; Humberto Avila, 46; Gregory McFarland Jr, 36; Kareem Sims, 43; Debra Lynn Hord, 57; and Jermaine Reeves, 52.
SF has 3-5x the property crime of most major cities in the United States. I imagine most violent crime is targeted (i.e. the victim is not a random person walking down the street), but property crime is scary because it can happen to the best of us, our friends and our family, in even the "safest" neighborhoods. We all know friends whose cars have been broken into. And it's easy to imagine --- what if my kids were at home during one of these home break-ins? (Note that burglaries are not classified as violent crime in SF)
I don't look down on people complaining about property crime, I'd just like them to be honest about what they are complaining about.
SF is 55 out of the biggest 100 cities on burglary rates, by the way.
(It's interesting how all this is apparently a controversial take.)
However, property crime is absolutely irrelevant when presented with the news of someone's murder, yet so many people here are quick to conflate them as somehow equivalent vis a vis personal safety, etc.
(Sidenote: I personally don't understand anyone thinking that property crime is "scary". Your car is not your kid. Your wallet is not your body. Your house is not your family. These things are not in the same class, and a loss in one category is not the same as a loss in the other. I'm not sure how one could argue otherwise, but it's apparently a widely-held worldview.)
Are there forums with better user moderation systems that boost ranking of quality comments and decrease ranking of comment noise? Something where I can systematically increase the ranking of comments of users I respect (or I transitively respect), and decrease the ranking of comments for users that I see write crap. Ideally tagged (e.g. I want to uprank a particular users opinions on programming languages, but I want to strongly downrank their economic opinions)
It seems like you want a personalized filter bubble to confirm your pre-existing views and hide comments from anyone who even votes the same way as someone who contradicts your views. This is generally considered an anti-feature in public discussions, especially on HN. Calling all posts that you disagree with "crap" and ignoring them does a disservice to the conversation and to yourself.
The actual "crap" does get filtered out pretty well: the spam, slurs, trolling, low-effort jokes, and other things that derail the conversation. What you are calling "crap" are people's genuinely-held beliefs, some more coherently expressed than others, but which resonated with many others here. It is much better to engage than to ignore. I see that you didn't comment in that thread, which is a shame. Substantive disagreements are what move us all forward.
You might want to try Facebook, they do a really good job at keeping you in your preferred group's information cocoon.
My guess was drug deal gone wrong. But tech deal gone wrong makes sense too, I guess.
edit: my drug guess was before the person was named, not implying anything, just know drugs are a popular hobby in SF
The problem with the discourse was that everyone forgot that people basically never get randomly murdered. There's almost always a reason for a murder - number 1 is domestic disputes, number 2 is gang-related, and the list goes on, but almost nobody gets murdered randomly. Assaults and thefts are a different story, and SF's problem with those crimes got conflated with a murder (which is a rare crime in SF).
At the same time though I’ve spent many late nights in the area and never had any negative encounters.
How is one story really highlighting something? This is just one anecdote where it wasn't what people expected, it's not proof they're wrong.
(I have no idea if they are, it's just a bad argument)
I saw this most extremely during COVID, and I usually hate "both side-ing" things, but I did see this pretty extremely on both sides. "MASKS DON'T WORK!!", "YES THEY DO!!", "IT WAS A LAB LEAK!!", "IT WAS ANIMALS FROM THE WET MARKET!!", "KIDS ARE FINE!!", "KIDS ARE AT SERIOUS RISK!!". It's like at some point I just wanted to scream "Maybe we just don't know yet."
I get a lot out of the things shared here and the discourse, but sometimes we get those threads and I just can't believe so many otherwise smart, intelligent people would believe and say such horrible things.
The only submission about Rob Lee’s death that stayed at the top of the page was one that didn’t mention that he was murdered in the headline, and where dang came in and told everyone to keep politics out of it and avoid flamewar stuff.
People said it was reasonable that people mass flagged any submission that mentioned the murder in its headline, because it was flamewar stuff.
But now we have this submission. I looked through all of the top comments, and they’re _all_ using this to talk about the larger “is San Francisco safe?” debate. About half of them are specifically complaining about other people’s views, including complaining about other Hacker News comments.
But as you can see from that link and the vote counts, it was definitely (pretty quickly) unflagged, and then you can see in the top comments that dang just split the threads into 2 separate posts, one for rememberances of Bob Lee and the other one remained for political discussion.
The flip side is that people have zero interest in statistics-based discussions. Even supposedly data-driven engineers. If you find that property-crime has increased by X%, of which Y% can be attributed to specific public policy decisions, you will get zero traction if you frame this as a data-driven discussion. People grok stories. They may somewhat understand statistics and numbers, but they don't grok it. Hence why almost all discussions revolve around anecdotes with some statistics provided as supporting evidence.
Ironically, for-profit companies are far better at having data-driven discussions and decisions. I have little hope that this will ever be the case in public discourse.
From the looks of your replies, more than a few are back to comment here to say "Actually I am still right."
Which, frankly, seems to me more evidence I should just not bother to browse threads about this kind of inflammatory subject. Even on HN where discussion quality tends to be better, there's plenty of people who just show up to shout, and not listen.
My first instinct was it was related to tech.
When i heard about it at first i thought maybe it had something to do with MobileCoin… maybe someone lost a lot of money or was afraid to lose market share.
Then when I commented I was really trying to figure out the mechanics of how it went down if it really were a robbery.
You’re doing the same thing in this thread, where the very article we are discussing shows that murders have been on the rise in the past 5 years.
Your comment was good, then you used the edit to spew your confirmation bias.
They caught her because they found traces of fish tank algaecide in the pill bottles. She reused the same mortar and pestle to do both. The local fish supply store had records of her buying the same algaecide.
1. Why was he out by himself? At 2 AM? 2. It didn't seem "random" at all, and in fact seemed like a targeted homicide.
Turns out both of these suspicions were valid. /shrug
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
It would be wrong to insist Chicago doesn't have a problem with violence just because I have much better than Vegas odds of not dying today. SF has different parameter inputs than Chicago, but my point applies.
Go walk through O Block / West Garfield tonight and report back.
Many of us mentioned this (I did in my comment), which is why we are so surprised about this murder. Now it makes more sense, although still tragic. We still get to gripe about property crime, which has been higher than average for awhile now and only seems to be getting worse.
There are many legitimate problems in Portland. If you go on any online discussion you'll see residents showcasing them. Those threads get barraged by liberals and conservatives that don't live here either defending or attacking the issue at hand. None of this is helpful.
I wish you could hear the frustration in my voice. Frustration at the Progressive Party for picking ideology over the health of the city, frustration at the right for turning our local issues into national showcases, frustration with the people in the comments who think commenting on the goings on of a city they don't live in is anything but a bad faith take.
I am tired. I want Progressives and Republicans gone, and from what I can see I'm part of a growing group in this city. We'll solve our own problems in due time, extremists can get lost.
So this particular murder was a personal thing, ok.
But that doesnt change the fact crime has gotten worse in SF.
Sure, people were wrong in their assumption that the murder was random. At least that's how it looks now. We haven't heard the suspects side, but....
But wrong that SF has become a dangerous and mismanaged city? Murder isn't the only violent crime and a lot of crime goes unreported. People don't feel safe walking around and you can't just dismiss that. It's their "lived experience". The fact that everyone assumed that Bob Lee was murdered randomly says something about the state of the city.
SF has a lot of issues and it has a lot of crime and other issues. It has been mismanaged for years now and things need to change.
Saying stuff like "a lot of [violent] crime goes unreported" is straight up fanciful thinking, and leads one to make claims that aren't falsifiable. People aren't reporting assaults? Sounds completely absurd.
Hmmm. This is kind of an interesting question. If people are safe, but don't feel safe, is it the city government's responsibility to fix that?
It definitely says something about the people that made that assumption. But this is just tautologic - it's unsafe because I feel unsafe, and I feel unsafe because it is unsafe. As a NY'er, this seems like a ton of whining by people that never actually encountered any actual threatening, so they make these whiny, dramatic, histrionic arguments about how the city is "beyond" saving, using all sorts of overhyped rhetoric.
When I first visited Shanghai I was surprised how safe it felt.
Walking around at 3 AM and I didn't feel nervous at all.
To those of us with mental models constructed from data, this case is proceeding as expected. If Momeni is guilty I hope he admits his guilt.
But that in no way changes the point that SF is a toxic environment. Here's the SF fire commissioner being brained by a violent homeless man this past week...
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/video-shows-ex-sf-fire-c...
Here is another article, just so everyone stays informed.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/fire-commissioner-ass...
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Edit out swipes."
The subject is violent crime. Don't cite a page that lumps property crimes in. Might want to look at some relevant data; https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-crime-rate-bob-lee-sf-vio... has a handy chart halfway down, if you're not interested in reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
However, homicide stats don't tell the whole story about a city. There are many areas in SF where a resident would never go at night (or often during the day) because of the large numbers of drug addicts and homeless people. This means businesses in those areas have a hard time surviving. In terms of property crimes (in which violent assault is not involved) SF is leading the pack, at least in the top five. The lower rate of homicide is probably also linked to California's stricter gun laws compared to Texas and Florida, and also, many homicide victims are homeless, see LA:
https://xtown.la/2022/06/08/murders-people-experiencing-home...
The only plausible long-term solution is improved housing, more jobs, public health care, better education etc. This would require expenditure of public funds on a national scale (you can't fix this city by city, or state by state, because people migrate), i.e. increased taxes on the wealthy and a redistribution of military-industrial spending to domestic infrastructure of various sorts.
I loved the Tenderloin back then, even though it was terrifying. It was full of weirdos and loonies and junkies and poverty stricken artsy types like me, who had no power or desire in gentrification - we were just poor too. But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it. The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway.
Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go, and you still complain when they dare to pop up where you are. I hope all that authenticity and exposed brick in your offices and apartments are worth it.
Comments demonizing other people and/or other groups of people are the scourge of internet forums. If you make it "y'all", that's worse yet, as now the demonized group gets to select itself and feel personally attacked.
1.) I grew up in the rural South, and was literally harassed for most of my career for saying "y'all" and "folks" but glad to see it's trendy to speak that way amongst the exact kind of people who used to assume I was ignorant for speaking that way.
2.) Your statement could just as easily be, on a different day: "Y'all abandoned the city for the suburbs and deprived the city of a tax base to help the poor." Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Same applies to livability: If you demand quality of life crimes be dealt with to make a city cleaner, you are guilty of not "embracing where we were and not trying to change it".
Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion and nostalgia without thinking about the fact that there are low income children who have to grow up in these places. Maybe parents aren't thrilled with having their 10 year olds learn the valuable life lessons of "how to not get knifed by a junkie in an alleyway".
Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs. I've personally (in DC) been mugged at gunpoint (they threw me onto the pavement in the process) and had a random guy jump out of his car to assault me because I walked in front of his car in heavy traffic (all cars stopped) to cross a street, and he viewed it as "disrespecting him".
Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor. Beliefs like that are luxuries for certain kinds of people who are insulated from the worst of it, one way or another. It's easy for a childless bohemian to have no problem with needles in parks, but for those of us raising future citizens, it's not fun.
Poverty and crime are not married.
My wife and I both grew up poor and working class. Living in trailers are in our life stories. You can be dog poor and still not be a junkie, still not mug others, still not assault people. This was understood widely in our upbringing and those we dealt with. People _did_ misbehave, but it was not "just what happens".
Presumption that poor areas must mean getting to deal with junkies, means dealing with violence, well, that is a morally bankrupt view. People don't have to do that. That is their choice. Improvement is possible.
> Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion
> Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs.
C'mon man. You don't know the person you are responding to and included multiple personal attacks in your response. There's a way to make your argument without making the person you are responding to your own personal hate-object.
Sadly, I think there is enough evidence that the game plan is to build classes of people that are constantly holding each other down. That is literally the point. :(
That's a different situation from this one, so, sure, if that's something that happened and then you're complaining about the place you don't live anymore, sure, that's also a statement that could be made.
> Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't
Not surprisingly, those aren't the only two options.
> Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor
I think you're confused if you think the GP's comment "It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway" was nostalgic for the getting knifed part.
So you think that "flee the black people" and "drive the black people out" are the only two options here? There are more things, Horatio.
I worked in the Warfield building from 2014 to 2017. It wasn't deep in the TL, but it still numbed me to things. Crossing police tape to get into the office? NBD. Coworkers getting assaulted? Happens every few months.
> Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go
If you said something like this about The Mission, I'd agree, but the TL wasn't even close to gentrifying. People tried to make it happen, but it never got to a point where people wanted to be there, and that was only at its periphery.
The people who "gave the poorest folks nowhere to go" were the ones who voted to prohibit the construction of anything but single-family houses[2] in 76% of the city[3].
[1] https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/MCHdocs/Epi/Birth-Data-Summa...
[2] https://sbuss.substack.com/p/when-did-things-go-wrong-in-san....
What leads you to conflate poverty with criminal activity, and proceed to victim-blame those who dare complain about criminal activity?
I think part of this is not realizing that a lot of the locals (the previous colonizers) are part of the problem. I can guarantee that the colonizers would love for more housing to be built in SF because they don't want to pay $2m for a 2bd townhouse either.
A huge portion of the SF "colonizer" demographic can't even fucking vote. They're all on visas.
https://sfist.com/2017/02/28/the_10_most_infamous_san_franci...
Nope. One of the wealthiest cities in the world fails to look after its inhabitants. A failure of government
The government isn't some distant third party. It's people from the community who are elected by their neighbors to run things in a certain way.
But really, if you took Stockholm out of Sweden and plunked it down into the middle of the US, how long do you think the social safety net would last before it went bankrupt? And this is assuming you retain the european willingness to be coercive about mandatory rehab and confinement (something US based progressives are reluctant to note is a feature of the european social safety programs they otherwise praise).
>One of the wealthiest cities in the world fails to look after its inhabitants...
These are the same thing.
I'm curious who you think you're referring to when you make a statement like this. (Hint: You're probably wrong).
Now it feels more like it can happen to anyone. I spent a few years in SF as a child 89-92. Have visited several times a year, every year, since 1992. It's definitely the most run down, dirty, and unpleasant it has ever been IMO. I have luckily never had anything stolen, but I for sure see more broken glass and more broken car windows too.
I 100% agree. I lived 5 blocks uphill from the Tenderloin and would walk though the loin to go to Bourbon & Branch or while coming back from the theater late at night. I learned all three of those lessons as well. It was rare that I was scared but I was always hyper alert.
Its great nothing traumatic happened to you, but I’ve seen how much more of a target for harassment some of my friends are and I don’t blame them for being afraid.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
there is no reason that SF has to be a lot less safe than Zurich. Zurich is not populated by aliens, people live in both places
It's political choices that make it the way it is.
>I loved the Tenderloin back then, even though it was terrifying. It was full of weirdos and loonies and junkies and poverty stricken artsy types like me, who had no power or desire in gentrification - we were just poor too. But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it. The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway.
>But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it.
Poor is fine. It's a hard life, but it's a state of being. Even being artsy and a little crazy; that's great. The rest of it though...? Why romanticize this? It's bad. We shouldn't romanticize bad. Learn your lessons, but let's want something better.
I commented below but the IT consulting LLC in the bio is inactive (both in the division of corp website and online). Is that the only evidence here for the statement above?
Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.
This is from "multiple police sources" from the article.
In this case the GP contained a link to the suspect's linkedin page.
Edit: after thinking about it, I think we probably don't need to redact. If it were a random person caught up in the story it would be different, but once a person has been arrested for a crime they arguably become a public figure, even though innocent-until-proven-guilty is fortunately a thing.
It's a borderline case and I'm not sure, but anyway have restored the original comment for now.
Edit 2: plus the same link appears in the article itself.
If you want to rename your account, we can do that, but in the meantime I've banned this one.
Also, please don't use HN for ideological or political battle—it's against HN's rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Tagline is kinda weird... isn't murder kinda indicative of a law enforcement failure?
I realize this topic has been fraught with it from the beginning, but even by that relative standard the comment was particularly bad.
I assume (and hope) the police have more solid evidence like a fingerprint on that knife or Nima's own blood/DNA at the scene or on the knife as is common with stabbings.
You cease to be "a person of interest" and become the suspect right about when the cops drive across the Bay Bridge to pick you up and bring you to jail.
> We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni.
When you put a violent criminal to death, the crime rate is permanently and instantly lowered. If you lock them in a cage for 20 years we all pay the bills and they end up coming out and murdering again on the first day out. Total insanity.
This is known as a false dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we can think of other things which are more agreeable than either of these.
No:
>But Krista Lee emphasized that her ex-husband, with whom they have two children, loved San Francisco and moved to Florida to live with his father after his mom died, not because he was scared to live in the city.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/emeryville-man-arrested-in-connect...
He’s more likely to say this was a coverup by the deep state than admit it wasn’t a random crime.
He was in the car with suspect yet he says "someone stabbed me" ??
https://www.foxnews.com/us/cash-app-founder-bob-lee-died-ple...
edit: it still doesn't make sense to me. If someone I know stabs me and I assume I have few minutes to live and call 911, I would say "help, Joe Doe stabbed me". I wouldn't say "someone", because that implies a stranger.
In real life you're in shock and what you do is completely disconnected from what you think you would do. The "watch people die" video collections show that, someone can be obviously dying (massive gunshot wounds, etc) and they carry on like nothing happened until they fall over dead.
Again, it doesn't seem normal to say "someone shot me", if you know WHO shot you.
He's reporting his status and begging for help. He's thinking about survival.
What do you expect to have said in his situation?
